Rules

Dr. Norman Doidge wrote the foreword for Jordan Peterson's book, 12 RULES FOR LIFE. On Page vii, he wrote this: "RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn't life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don't take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?

My response: Doidge is correct in that people have deep-rooted ambivalence towards accepting rules. It is very complicated--one of the trickiest things for even the wise to get right.

 On one hand, humans are born depraved, so they require moral, social, legal, and spiritual rules to live by to make personal and social life bearable. When they feel good about themselves, and desire to be good, they strive to follow just rules and laws. 

When they do not like themselves, and are motivated to do wicked things, they are rebellion against God, society and their own better themselves, and they are outlaws against rules of any kind. Paradoxically, the more they voluntarily accept, follow, and live in accordance with just rules and laws, the fewer rules and laws--beyond a few reasonable ones--the fewer will be the rules and laws passed for them to follow. 

The more they flout just rules and laws, the more are authorities compelled or authorized to install over the folk, authoritarian, intrusive, numerous, centralized, and tyrannical are the rules and laws that force them to behave, at least on the surface.

On the other hand, people require liberty and self-determination to flourish, be happy and fulfilled, and excessive or internal rules and laws, even those that are just, potentially corrupt the individual in isolation, and the whole community cumulatively. 

People require and deserve and must be granted as much liberty as they can handle. There will always be external institutions and laws that govern our behavior, in all domains, and though humans require rules more than not, liberty for a self-realizing, anarchist, supercitizen adult is a person requiring maximum liberty he internalizes, legislates, adjudicates, and administrates rules that he has authorized for himself to obey, and this is how he balance his and society's need to harmonize the need for rules and security with personal freedom and choice.

When we are truth-bearing and realistic, we become aware of our need for structure and rules to lead productive, meaningful, happy lives. We need rules to live by that are none so smothering as to cancel out or trample personal choice.

As Peterson shows, we require a blend of order and chaos in our lives, but the order should be internally derived and self-directed as one leave some room for chaos, randomness, chance, and play. One's life should be self-governed more from reason than from passion and feeling, but those are important second hand motives and standards in their own right.

Let me quote Doidge again: "People don't clamour for rules, even in the Bible . . . as when Moses comes down from the mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with ten commandments, and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They'd been Pharaoh's slaves and subject to his tyrannical regulations for four hundred years, and after that Moses subjected them to the harsh desert wilderness for another forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now, free at last, they are unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an idol, a golden calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption."

My response: Humans are complicated creatures; we are half beast and half angel. When our wills are good and we seek to live and act like angels, we are willing to, even insist that we obey and live under just rules and laws.

When we live as beasts driven by our passions, our lusts, our desires and ease, we rebel against living under just rules and laws.

When we follow the Dark Couple, we rebel against just rules and law, and obey unjust rules, laws and chaos as promulgated and regulated by Satan and Lera.

When we love and follow the Light Couple, we rebel against unjust laws and rules, and obey and perpetuate just rules, laws and order as sanctioned by the Father and the Mother.

The Dark Couple rule this world, and we group-live and hate ourselves; all of these psychological and ontological preconditions predispose us to rebelling against just rules and laws.

 

Let me quote Doidge some more from Page viii: "So rules there will be--but please, not too many. We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency, and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another's rules?"

My response: Yes, we need want, nor is it good for us to have too many rules to follow.  We are ambivalent about rules, as we are ambivalent about everything. Some just rules are good for us, but even just rules that are good for us, if excessive in number, will sicken us. We need agency and to work out our own affairs and ends as much as is possible, and increasingly to match the number of citizens that become supercitizens and living angels.

As to defying being judged, our actions can and should be judged early and often by ourselves and all others. To judge someone’s soul is a task reserved by the Divine Couple, but judged we will be. We are living and doing good and evil in a world created by them, and for which they are responsible, so we will not escape divine judgment and divine justice in this world or in the next.

Doidge continues: 'And judged we are. After all, God did not give Moses 'The Ten Suggestions,' he gave Commandments; and if I'm a free agent, my first reaction to a commandment might just be that nobody, not even God, tells me what to do, even if it's good for me. But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions--and there is nothing freeing about that."

My response: We are or will be judged and wielding free agency and being judged for how we handled it are our involuntary destiny. We are slaves to our passions without rules that we must follow. Doidge’s remark reveals that ordered liberty, the moral state of our free agency being our voluntary acceptance of the necessity that we obey God's just rules is quite different from license, a state of doing whatever we want in a social or polity reality in which there are no rules for us to follow.